Question

I bought a used T400 with a fresh Win7 professional x64 install already on it. The seller forgot to install the lenovo drivers, so I downloaded the appropriate ones from lenovo website.

Every time I try to install one (such as the Intel display driver), it goes through the installer, but when running any of the unpacked "setup.exe" files, I get:

Shellexecuteex error code 5 - Access Denied.

I'm logged in as administrator and still see this problem. Any ideas?

Answer

There are several possible solutions:

1) You could try to rightclick Setup.exe and chose run as administrator to see if that works better. This will run the installation with higher privileges even if the account you use is an administrator. This is because of UAC (User Access Control) a new feature for Windows Vista/7.

2) If that doesn't work then open a command prompt and type "set" then press enter. You should find "TEMP" and/or "TMP". These should point to a exising directory and normally "C:\Users\<logon name>\AppData\Local\Temp". Make sure the directory actually exist and not pointing to the wrong directory like your windows folder or the root of C:\ or something like that.

3) Perhaps one of the easiest approaches would be to take advantage of Lenovo's automatic update utilitiy - TVSU. Think Vantage System Update. When you run this software it will give you a list of drivers and software from Lenovo for your computer only. You can choose which one of them to download and install. It's a lot easier and faster compared to downloading and installing everything manually. It's also easy to use when checking for new drivers.